Abstract
The illusion-of-transparency seems like an egocentric bias, in which people believe that their inner feelings, thoughts and perspectives are more apparent to others than they actually are. In Experiment 1, participants read out true and false episodic memories to an audience. Participants over-estimated the number of people who would think that they were the liar, and they overestimated how many would correctly identify the liar. Experiment 2 found that with lessened task demands, and by using a scale of doubt, participants distinguished lies from truthful statements (albeit with a degree of error). Over the two experiments, results indicated that people have some ability to distinguish lies from truth (in illusion-of-transparency tasks), although people often overestimate this ability, and participants sometimes think their own lies are easier to detect than is really the case.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bond, C. F., & DePaulo, B. M. (2006). Accuracy of deception judgements. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(3), 214–234.
Camerer, C., Lowenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The curse of knowledge in economic settings: an experimental analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 97, 1232–1253.
Epley, N., & Caruso, E. M. (2004). Egocentric ethics. Social Justice Research, 17(2), 171–187.
Epley, N., Keysar, B., Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T. (2004). Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(3), 327–339.
Fischoff, B. (1975). Hindsight = foresight: the effect of outcome knowledge on judgement and uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 288–299.
Fischoff, B. (1982). For those condemned to study the past: heuristics and biases in hindsight. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.), Judgements under uncertainty: heuristics and biases (pp. 335–354). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (1998). The illusion of transparency: biased assessments of others’ ability to read one’s emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 332–346.
Gilovich, T., & Savitsky, K. (1999). The spotlight effect and the illusion of transparency: egocentric assessments of how we are seen by others. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8(6), 165–168.
Gopnik, A. (1993). How do we know our own minds? The illusions of 1st-person knowledge of intentionality. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 1–14.
Griffin, D., & Ross, L. (1991). Subjective construal, social inference, and human misunderstanding. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 4). New York: Academic.
Hinds, P. A. (1999). The curse of expertise: the effects of expertise and debiasing methods on predictions of novice performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5, 205–221.
Keysar, B., & Bly, B. (1995). Intuitions of the transparency of idioms: can one keep a secret by spilling the beans? Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 89–109.
Keysar, B., Ginzel, L. E., & Bazerman, M. H. (1995). States of affairs and states of mind: the effect of knowledge on beliefs. Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 64, 283–293.
Keysar, B., Lin, S., & Barr, D. (2003). Limits on theory of mind use in adults. Cognition, 89, 25–41.
Kruger, J., Epley, N., Parker, J., & Ng, Z. (2005). Egocentrism over email: can we communicate as well as we think. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 925–936.
Kruger, J., Kuban, J., & Gordon, C. L. (2006). Intentions in teasing: when “just kidding” isn’t good enough. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(3), 412–425.
Mitchell, P., Robinson, E. J., Isaacs, J. E., & Nye, R. M. (1996). Contamination in reasoning about false belief: an instance of realist bias in adults but not children. Cognition, 59, 1–21.
Nickerson, R. S. (1999). How we know—and sometimes misjudge—what others know: imputing one’s own knowledge to others. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 747–753.
Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the representational mind. Hove: Psychology Press.
Royzman, E. B., Cassidy, J., & Baron, J. (2003). “I know, you know”: epistemic egocentrism in children and adults. Review of General Psychology, 7(12), 38–65.
Savitsky, K., Elphy, N., & Gilovich, T. (2001). Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Overestimating the impact of our failures, shortcomings, and mishaps. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 44–56.
Savitsky, K., & Gilovich, T. (2003). The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 618–625.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgement under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1130.
Van Boven, L., Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (2003). The illusion of transparency in negotiations. Negotiation Journal, 19(2), 117–131.
Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: the truth about false belief. Child Development, 72, 655–684.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rai, R., Mitchell, P. & Faelling, J. The Illusion-of-Transparency and Episodic Memory: Are People Egocentric or Do People Think that Lies are Easy to Detect?. Psychol Stud 57, 58–66 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-011-0138-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-011-0138-2